Photo of Oklahoma protester misrepresented as Nashville shooter
CLAIM: A photo of a person holding a sign featuring pink, blue and white guns and the words “trans rights… or else” shows the shooter who killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The person who took this photograph confirmed it was captured in Oklahoma City before news of the Nashville shooting was widespread. It does not show the shooter.
THE FACTS: The photo circulated widely online after the police chief identified the shooter as transgender in a late afternoon news conference on Monday. Police had previously identified the shooter as female.
“This is the trans shooter, Audrey Hale,” read one tweet shared thousands of times. “The Feds are in the middle of trying to scrub ALL of her social media & pictures from the internet.”
The tweet claimed the shooter was a “terrorist” who wanted to kill Christians, “as the sign makes clear.”
However, the person holding the sign in the image is not the shooter who opened fire at The Covenant School, killing three students and three adults.
The woman who took the photo confirmed to The Associated Press that she captured it about 11 a.m. CDT on Monday at a protest and march in downtown Oklahoma City, hundreds of miles away from Nashville.
“It was a protest entitled Bigotry is Bad for Business,” said Chelsea, the photographer, whose last name is being withheld over concerns for her safety. “They protested, they marched. They weren’t violent.”
Police received a call about an active shooter at the Presbyterian school about 10:15 a.m. CDT Monday. They fatally struck Hale about 10:27 a.m., police said.
The photographer said she didn’t know the shooting had happened when she tweeted photos from the protest. Social media users then took her photo and misrepresented it as showing the shooter.
“All night long I’ve been trying to explain to people that this is a stunt people are pulling,” she said. “That person absolutely is not the shooter.”
Information on the shooter’s gender remained unclear Tuesday. For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale identified.
Hale, who was a former student of the school, had a map of the school with a planned route for the shooting, and officers found writings, police said.
No motive has been confirmed by police.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.